


Praeparatio

by carloabay



Category: Black Widow (Comics), Marvel (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Red Room (Marvel), Spy Natasha Romanov, kind of, not exactly canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-19
Updated: 2020-11-15
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:22:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27084064
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carloabay/pseuds/carloabay
Summary: "Have either of you ever studied Quantum Physics?""Only to make conversation."
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Natasha Romanov
Comments: 2
Kudos: 40





	1. A Conversation About Quantum Mechanics

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Quantum mechanics is easier than Natalia had thought it would be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: I don't pretend to know anything about quantum mechanics (Google is a wizard) and I don't own any of the characters in these chapters :) enjoy!

"Repeat, Romanova," snaps the teacher, in English. Natalia thinks about snapping his neck.

The room smells like chalk and stale paper, and there's a whistle of cold air streaming in from the vent above the blackboard.

She's not twelve anymore. They don't have to pretend this is schooling.

No, this is preparation. It always has been.

The teacher raps the desk with his thin nails. 

"Repeat!"

"New evidence indicating that light and matter have both wave and particle characteristics at the atomic and subatomic levels was crucial to the development of the theory," Natalia recounts flatly. The teacher's brow twitches in an almost-frown, and she tilts her head, waiting for him to give her a reason to hurt him.

She could. She could rip his throat out and they would just send in another angular, bespectacled scholar to sneer and spit at her.

"You are supposed to be making conversation," he says, swiping a smudge of chalk off the desk with the tip of one thin finger. His hands are papery and look like they've never seen the sun.

Natalia says nothing. He doesn't deserve a reply.

∆

The convention is almost tearfully boring.

It's stuffed full of old men, too, which makes her stand out like a pink star, in this milling canvas of grey-suited, wrinkled faces.

They should have sent her in with someone to keep an eye on her. She dips her hand into a Spanish gentleman's pocket and slips his money clip discreetly into her bra. Four hundred euros, just sitting in his pocket, and it had been hers for the taking.

Two hours passes like a dim dream. She sits at a table, ignoring the chatter around her and thinking about gravity and the balcony four stories above them.

Enough to hurt, that fall.

"Dear boy, this is what we like to call a _physical_ science, not a magical fantasy, you can't simply say that-"

"No, Mr Handrew. A magical fantasy would be implying that I thought this up out of nowhere. In reality, most of my life has been spent in a laboratory, surrounded by various experiments, so I would much appreciate your respect while I explain myself."

Natalia takes a sip of her drink.

"You're wrong," she says, and the table falls into dead silence. There is the creak of ten old spines turning to look at her, and she lets her eyes drift over to her target instead, lazily tracing him as he moves from his chair and starts to walk across the room. Towards her.

"Excuse me?" 

"I said, you're wrong." She charges her Bites and offers the rest of the men a pretty smile. "There is plenty of evidence to refute your theory, including the fact that you've never stepped foot in a laboratory in your life." The man blinks. Her target is approaching. The others start to rustle with whispers. "CIA?" Natalia asks. "It's fairly obvious. Dress appropriately next time."

Her target steps around Natalia's chair and Natalia stands, hooks her ankle around his leg and pulls, sending him crashing face-first into the table. 

Pandemonium erupts. The men surge backwards, and the agent leaps across the table. He's too late. Natalia pulls her pin from her hair and slams it into the back of the target's skull. 

The skylight is open. There's a cord hanging down in front of her face, and Natalia clutches at it.

A jerk and a whine, and the cord zips upwards, taking Natalia with it. She doesn't look down to see the agent with his gun out, or the target with his brains seeping quickly into the pristine tablecloth.

∆

"And then he was talking about relatibility-"

"General relativity," Natasha says, turning the next page of her book. Over at the table, silence drifts from Wanda's open mouth.

"What?" 

"The more massive an object, the more it warps the space around it," Natasha elaborates.

"Albert Einstein," Vision says mildly. Natasha waves her pen at him in vague agreement, then underlines _and I strayed breathlessly to the edge of the road, the fade of his footsteps burning into my chest_ , because it's ridiculously pretentious.

"I didn't know they learnt quantum mechanics in sophomore year at American High Schools," Natasha adds.

"Since when do assassins learn quantum mechanics at Russian assassin grade school?" Tony retorts, and Natasha throws her pen without looking. It bounces off Tony's forehead and he yelps in pain.

∆

Scott pauses, eyeing Natasha's sandwich for a good long second.

"Have either of you ever studied quantum physics?" Scott asks. Steve's massive shoulders move in a disagreeing shrug. Natasha has to think about it.

"Only to make conversation," she says, and Steve rolls his eyes.

Natasha hides a smile. If only he knew.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ayooo my first winterwidow!! All chapters will be quite short but Bucky/Nat coming up soon :)


	2. Booty Boot Camp

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prepare for a horror of mashing between comic and MCU canon :)

"You ever boxed before?" Hogan asks, with a little smile on his face. Natasha tilts her head, pretending not to notice how bad he smells. Sweat and unwashed gloves.

"I have, yes," she says, mostly to humour him. Hogan smiles a little wider, like she's joking.

"What, like, the Tae Bo? Booty Boot Camp? Crunch? Something like that?" He sounds like he's teasing. Natasha clears her throat, digging her nails into her own hips.

∆

"Rah!" Yelena screams, pretending to spring. Natasha jerks backwards on instinct, and Yelena's lips twist in a grinning little snarl.

Natasha grinds her bootheel into the ground. Dust whispers beneath the shoe and she settles into her old, steady stance.

"Isn't this what they trained you for, Natalia?" Yelena rasps. "You should know better than to try and run."

"And you should know better than to take on the Black Widow," Natasha warns. The name feels good in her mouth. Its legacy settles on her tongue like the kind of poison kings die from. Her legacy. Her poison.

Yelena's face, shadowed by the dark cloak of the container behind her, distorts bitterly. 

"I _am_ the Black Widow," she growls, and leaps at her. Natasha bats away the first hit that comes for her, but Yelena is fast and she fights like a razor. 

Natasha kicks at her knee, noting that Yelena doesn't keep her guard low enough, and a crack sounds from the joint, indicating that she's hit her mark.

Yelena howls and Natasha spins away. She's wasted too much time already, and if she can, she'd like to get home as soon as possible. Wherever that is at the moment.

∆

They make him watch the little girls, sometimes. The fights. The fights where only one comes out alive.

Sometimes they make him watch the older ones.

Natalia. Sometimes they make him watch her.

She's the best in the room. Always. Mostly, she's just an arc of fire-fed hair and vicious kicks, and he loses himself in the way she moves. Like a dancer. Like she has an audience.

They make him teach the younger ones: the killing spots, the weak joints, the easy way the snap someone's neck with only one hand. 

The little girls then teach him, how to braid, how to clean blood off concrete, how to stand on his head.

But Natalia. One day, they manhandle him onto the hard, bloodstained mat and tell him to fight, and when he looks up, it's her.

She strikes before he has a chance to study how poisonous her eyes are, how brilliantly green, and her foot lands on his hip, driving him backwards.

He can't bring himself to hit her, but then the next punch she throws dislocates his jaw, and the heat of the pain throws him into a frenzy.

He launches himself at her. Hands around her throat, boots slamming into her knees and her shins, the cracking of bone, her nails slashing desperately over his face.

They have to pull him away before it gets too far.

They beat him for it.

"You do not try to kill the girls!" roars the punisher, and he bares his broken teeth.

He doesn't think he would have killed her. By the way she torqued and thrashed beneath his hands, he doesn't think she would have let him. She's always the best in the room.

The nail marks on his cheek don't heal for weeks.

∆

Hogan throws a punch while she has her head turned.

Fair play.

Natasha grabs his glove and she flips, cartwheels on one hand. Her knee hooks around his neck and then her momentum takes her over and they both crash to the ground.

Hogan hits the floor with a flail of legs and a helpless grunt, and Natasha holds him cruelly for a second before she releases him.

Pepper and Stark are rushing over before Hogan can even realise he's still alive, and Natasha climbs to her feet, pulls her trousers up and climbs out of the ring, ears burning slightly. Hill will make her pay for that later.

But it was satisfying, at least.


	3. 'Cause She Modelled In Tokyo

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 'Natalie Rushman' 'models' in 'Tokyo'.

It's slightly itchy, the underwear. Under the lighting, her skin is a frail white. Natasha stares straight at the camera and pushes down the urge to dig her fingernail under the band of the bra and scratch.

They're giving her instructions, tilt her head one way, lift her shoulder, rearrange her jaw, but all she can think of is the flash of the camera, the dramatic black print of the underwear on her thigh, like an inky shadow.

_Never get caught in a camera._

It's simple enough, one of the most basic rules of any kind of secrecy. It's not affecting her, not really. It's doing something else.

An hour later, Hill hands Natasha a coat and tells her to go back to her cabin, and there's less flint than usual in her voice when she says so. 

It's only three in the afternoon. Natasha spends the rest of the day reading all about Natalie Rushman's early life. 

Rushman did ballet from the age of seven, apparently. It's like some kind of sick joke.

She spends the first part of the night with her head down the toilet, images of ribbons and white lights and gloved hands tattooed onto her eyeballs.

Natasha surfaces from the toilet and her rush of memories, gasping. Her eyes twinge with acidic tears, and there's sweat collecting on her scalp, vomit dripping from the tips of her hair.

(She's growing it out, and it's curling.)

She spends the second half of the night breaking pretty much every S.H.I.E.L.D rule there is to break; she hacks into classified online files, she steals personal and governmental information, she slips off the docked Helicarrier without permission or a leave of absence, and she breaks into Deputy Director Hill's home through the utility room window.

"It's like you want to get court martialed," Hill snaps from the doorway. Natasha blinks at her: she's just an angular shadow in the rectangle of bright light, but then Hill reaches for the light switch and flicks it on. 

It's an attack on her dark-softened brain. The light whines for a second, and everything in the room is thrown into pale relief. Natasha cringes ever so slightly, and Hill stuffs her hands into her sweatpant pockets and frowns.

"What are you doing here, Romanoff?"

There are a hundred things she could say. Some of them are right on the tip of her tongue. 

The sweat is cold on her head now, she knows her hair is hanging, lank, to her shoulders. There must be bruises under her eyes. The skin on her hands is tissue-thin, her veins frail and blue beneath it.

"I didn't know where else to go," Natasha croaks, finally. "I--" she'd been about to apologise. It gets stuck on its way out, snagged on thorns on the back of her tongue, and she swallows it painfully back down. "Barton's away," she says instead. She knows she'd go straight to him if she could.

Here, pinned to the floor by Hill's dark glare, she doesn't feel any better.

Hill sighs. Then she nudges the utility door open wider with her hip, and jerks her chin towards the warm-lit kitchen.

Natasha scampers in, refusing to let herself feel pathetic, and Hill points her to the bathroom across the hall. Black and white tiles, a glass screen around the shower, matching blue flannel and towel, and two bathrobes on the back of the door.

Wordlessly, Hill shows her how to work the shower and then she leaves, throwing a fresh towel over the rail and shutting the door behind her. Natasha steps into the shower, shivering, and the moment the scorching water hits her shoulders, every muscle loosens instantly.

There's a rush of relief and a waterfall of thoughts, none of which she feels particularly inclined to land on. 

One is a memory, though, a golden one, for once, and she lets it cycle around her head like a child on a toy bike.

It's yellow wallpaper and starched sheets and a candle on the edge of a basin. It's a heavy knife balancing on someone's finger, and deep laughter that's unfamiliar, rough with disuse.

There are plums, too, for some reason. Plums and snow outside and an old woman's hands setting a rich cake on an old wooden table. A loaded gun on an ancient dresser. 

Metal fingers...

Natasha blinks the memory away, so hard that black patches bloom across the screen door of the shower.

She's drenched, now, and the steam is fogging in front of her face.

She turns the shower off.

Natasha takes her time to get dry and get dressed, but when she finally emerges from the bathroom, Hill is cross-legged on a chair, frowning at her phone and tapping the countertop with one fingernail.

"Thank you," Natasha says. It claws its way out of her throat like a miniature suit of armour. Hill looks up. There's a moment of silence between them, and then Hill smiles awkwardly.

"No problem." She nods at a plate a few feet away, covered with a dishcloth. "I made you some food."

"Oh."

"It's pasta," Hill adds. Natasha makes a humming sound, and lifts the dishcloth off the plate. She inhales the steam with a slight sniff; it smells incredible. 

Natasha digs in without looking back at Hill, and within moments, it's all gone. "You want...to talk about it?" Hill asks tentatively, and Natasha shakes her head the next instant, her mouth still bulging with pasta. She gulps it down, and it scorches her throat somewhat, still hot.

"No."

"Okay. Want to stay the night? I can get you off tomorrow. I mean-- get you out of work--" she's flushing now, ridiculously, and Natasha snorts.

"That's how it is, Hill?"

"Do you want to stay the night or not?" Hill replies, obviously attempting to push down an embarrassed smile. Natasha pretends to think it over.

"What've you got on TV?" she asks. Hill raises an eyebrow.

"Cartoons, mostly."

"How old are you, Hill?"

"Says the woman who spent all of the Mexico City mission playing video games," Hill retorts with a grin. Natasha flicks the dishcloth at her and Hill catches it in both hands. She forgets Hill knows her, sometimes. She forgets Hill knows little things like that. Memories, to be honest. "Cartoons?" Hill proposes. Natasha grins.

"Cartoons are good."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> :)))


	4. Eyes In The Sky

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Marksmanship is a deadly skill. It's also a necessity.

Kill order forty-three.

A file claps shut on the table. It's thick and neat. He awaits his orders, like always, eyes on the the deep dent in the table that Fadeev made with someone's head last night.

It's still rusty with blood.

"No witnesses," Fadeev says, like always, eyes like chips of gold. "Partner, Black Widow. Move out at oh-three-hundred. Dismissed." Fadeev watches him leave, like always. The way back to his room is one long corridor, and the dusty echoes of his boots ping off the walls like stray bullets.

He waits there for eleven hours. He ties knots in his shoelaces. He digs a fingernail in between the metal plates, he bends it until it snaps and blood seeps out from under the broken nail. 

They fly in by helicopter. In the corner of his eye, she muddies the shine of her rifle with dull paint, and tightens the drawstrings of her hood.

"You're fast," he says, and his throat is full of the rash of eleven hours of disuse. She runs her tongue along her bottom lip like a grass snake and watches him from the corner of her eye.

"So you speak, do you?"

"Yes." The sound of the helicopter blades fill the gap between them, and he doesn't know what she wanted him to say.

"What did they do to you for breaking my shin?" she asks, but she doesn’t sound curious. His Russian feels like an imposter weaving its ragged way through her voice, because it's like her tongue is ink, the way she speaks, and his mouth is little more than sandpaper. He takes a while to answer.

"They- beat me. I guess."

"You _guess_?" she spits, scornful, sideways. "What are you, English?"

"I am Russia," he says, on an impulse that feels like a shot of electricity, and he'd know all about that. She falls silent instantly. She daubs the paint off her finger and onto the seal of the thick window.

∆

It's forty stories high. The wind is slick and sharp, and it snaps at Natalia’s collar playfully.

She loads the bullets into the weapon, and the Winter Soldier stands with his hands in his pockets, eyes pinning her to the floor.

He's odd. _I am Russia_. She has to wonder how many times they've beat that into him.

She presses her eye to the sights, cold metal melting into her skull. She knows the target; his face is pinned into her empty memory, they made sure of that.

“Adjust your shoulder,” he says, out of nowhere, and Natalia almost flinches. His voice would give her shivers, if she were the shivering type; coarse and disused, like it’s made of stiff new cloth. “It should be lower.” He thumps a warm hand onto her shoulder, like he’s hammering home a nail, and she lowers it obediently. Instantly, the weapon sits easier in her hands. It’s no longer trying to slip through her fingers. “Good.” He spits over the edge of the building. The wind shrieks in her ears.

The target stops at a shop window to admire something, and Natalia, with a thought from a little-used corner, wonders how he has so much time, so much leisure, to stop and stare. How can he wistfully gaze through a window, waste away in one space for a tiny wedge of a second, when a little spider on a rooftop has him securely netted in a sniper’s line?

“Take the shot,” growls the soldier. He sounds twitchy, like a drug addict seconds away from his next fix, but there’s someone wasting time in the queue in front of him.

“Be patient,” Natalia murmurs back. They are both being taught today, then. The man leans back from the shop window with an appreciative, wishful nod.

She pulls the trigger.

Seconds later, the two of them are halfway down the stairwell of the building, and the shop window is decorated with a spray of gore. He shouldn’t have stopped to gawk.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Would love some feedback in the comments!


End file.
